Cumulative activation during positive and negative events and state anxiety predicts subsequent inertia of amygdala reactivity.

ABSTRACT: Inertia, together with intensity and valence, is an important component of emotion. We tested whether positive and negative events generate lingering changes in subsequent brain responses to unrelated threat stimuli and investigated the impact of individual anxiety. We acquired fMRI data while participants watched positive or negative movie-clips and subsequently performed an unrelated task with fearful and neutral faces. We quantified changes in amygdala reactivity to fearful faces as a function of the valence of preceding movies and cumulative neural activity evoked during them. We demonstrate that amygdala responses to emotional movies spill over to subsequent processing of threat information in a valence-specific manner: negative movies enhance later amygdala activation whereas positiv

SUBMITTER: Pichon S 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC4321619 | biostudies-literature | 2015 Feb

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature